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Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Anselm's Proof that God Exists (Notes:61)

In Anselm’s first work, he offered many
proofs for the existence of God and its various divine attributes. But he
quickly became dissatisfied with these proofs, primarily because all of them
were so complicated (“a chaining together of many arguments”). So, he did what
any enterprising person would do—he searched for a single argument which could
do it all. Unfortunately, this search would consume Anselm and he eventually
began to think that his inability to concentrate on anything else, was the work
of the devil; though he tried to give up thinking on it, he found that he
simply could not forsake the idea of a single, all doing, proof. Eventually,
though, the proof came to him—this is Anselm’s second work, the Proslogian. (Probably didn’t spell that
right; again, all of these great course lectures I am transcribing notes to
without any spelling reference.)

The argument Anselm lays out is commonly
called ‘the ontological argument’, or, as Professor Williams calls it, the
argument of the Proslogian; he does
this as the ‘ontology’ part has little to do with what we now know as ontology,
and though some thinkers will make a big deal of the Greek ‘onto-‘, the truth
is that it has little to do with anything which we today would recognize.

Fun fact: the medieval simply called this
“Arguementali-Anse,” or ‘the argument of Anselm.

If Anselm argument works, then it proves
everything—God, his divine attributes, the whole she-bang! So, the argument you
say? Well, much debate has raged over Anselm’s work, specifically, in how the
argument is presented, Professor Williams does not share in the consensus which
the academic mainstream has arrived at. So he offers first a non-committal
consensus reading (Gonio’s criticisms) and then how the argument ought to be understood
in light of that evidence.

(Throughout this lecture, I will simply be
jotting down the gist of the content instead of a highly detailed blow-by-blow
account due to a wish to focus on the big details.)

The argument-- Premise One: God is that
which nothing greater can be thought. Following this, then, our quest is to
find something in reality which fits this description of something being so
mighty and inconceivable that nothing beyond it may be thought; the genius of
this argument is that it posits God’s existence simply by forcing the reader to
think really hard. The example Williams gives is that if you define a unicorn
as a ‘horse with a horn’ then simply by focusing on that idea—of a horse with a
horn—then unicorns exist if you then find something
in nature which corresponds to ‘horse with a horn’.

Premise Two: That which nothing greater can
be thought, exists in our understanding. The analogy used this time is that of
a painter whose work exists in his mind before he paints it. Though the image
does not exist in reality, because he has yet to paint it, he understands it to
be real, not like those ‘fools’ who deny God because they cannot see it in
reality.

But, the question remains, we want to prove
that God exists in reality—how? Anselm uses the following principle: “It is
greater to exist in reality, than only in the understanding.” Anselm does not
defend this premise as he believe it to be obvious. Remember that ‘greater’
means something which has more ‘measure’ or metaphysical oomph. What is greater,
the real thing or the mere idea of a thing? Clearly a real thing, but if this
is true we can see now that the psalmist’s fool is self-contradictory; the fool
acknowledges that which nothing greater can be thought, exists in his
understanding. But he denies that which nothing greater can be thought exists
in reality. But since it’s greater to exist in reality than merely exist in the
understanding, if that which nothing greater can be thought existed only in the
understanding, it wouldn’t be that which a greater can be thought. You would be
able to think of something greater than that which nothing greater can be
thought, namely, that being itself only existing in reality. So it turns out
that in saying that God does not exist, is saying that which nothing greater
can be thought is that which is something greater can be thought. Obviously a
contradiction: what the fool says in his heart must be false, that which
nothing greater can be thought must exist in reality.

That is the consensus interpretation. It
is, again, not Williams’s own interpretation, so he now gives us his own view
on how the argument should be understood; Williams remarks that he feels that
the community has interpreted the argument this way was because the argument’s
first critic interpreted it this way. This is where we enter Gonio.

We know nothing about Gonio except his
criticism of Anselm, but this was enough to earn him a place in the history of
philosophy. Gonio was a monk, so he believed that God existed, but he just
didn’t think that Anselm’s argument proved God’s existence; not at least in the
way which the fool would’ve believed it to exist. So Gonio entitled his
response “A Reply on Behalf of the Fool”, what an unbeliever could say without
yielding to the force of Anselm’s argument. One of Anselm’s arguments in
particular that of ‘The Lost Island’ Counter-argument, has inspired resistance
to this day.

Williams says that it is worth quoting in
full since it is so clever. Gonio writes:

There
are those that say somewhere in the ocean is an island, which because of the
difficulty, or rather, impossibility, of finding what does not exist, some call
the lost island. This island, or so the story goes, is so plentifully endowed
than even the isles of the blessed. With an indescribable abundance of riches
and delights, and because it has neither owner nor inhabitant it is everywhere
superior in its abundant riches to all the other lands than human beings
inhabit. Suppose that someone tells me all this and the story is easily told so
I understand it. But if this person were to go on and draw a conclusion and say
that ‘you cannot any longer doubt that this island is more excellent than all
others on Earth truly exists somewhere in reality, for you do not doubt that
this island exists in your understanding, and since it is more excellent to
exist not merely in understanding but also in reality, this island must also
exist in reality. For if it did not, then any land that existed in reality
would be greater than it. And so this more excellent thing you have understood
would not in fact be more excellent. If I say he should try and convince me of
this argument that I should no longer doubt that this island truly exists,
either I would think that he was joking or I would not know who to think more
foolish—myself, if I grant him his conclusion, or him, if he thinks he has
established the existence of that island with any degree of certainty.

If we tidy up this argument then it seems
that we have one similar to Anselm’s own argument.

If Anselm’s argument proves the existence
of a being whose greater-ness cannot be thought, then Gonio’s argument proves
the existence of an island which no greater island can exist. Indeed, this can
be applied to anything, any [X] which
can be thought—tree, cockroach, piece of trash. Anselm, of course, replied to
Gonio and this is where things get tricky. Because people were so struck by the
island counter-argument, they judge Anselm’s response by attempting to find
that anti-island tract. But, Williams says that if that is what we look for in
Anselm’s reply, we will come away disappointed since Anselm’s response seems
non-responsive; we search for why his argument works for God but not an island
and yet, he never writes such an argument; he says that his argument works for
a God but not an island but he never explains why not.

Williams remarks that at first he believed
that Anselm’s non-response was an indignant non-response hiding the fact that
he simply couldn’t bring himself to admit that he was incorrect. But this
doesn’t square well with a piece of evidence which comes outside of Anselm’s
writings.

We learn from Anselm’s biographer that
Anselm himself ordered that he and Gonio’s exchange be appended to the Proslogian. What this tells us is that
Anselm must have thought that both his own piece was correct and that his
response to Gonio acceptable. Furthermore, he must have believed that some
purpose was served in appending the exchange within his work—to demonstrate
facts, minutia, forestall misunderstandings and the like. So if we read
Anselm’s response in this light, as a manner of illuminating latent details
left otherwise unsaid, then we find a reasonably clear line of argumentation
which he employed in the Proslogian.
Indeed, it makes the argument clearer.

At the start of Anselm’s reply he
identifies the crucial elements of Gonio’s objections: (1) Gonio argued that
that which nothing greater can be thought, cannot be thought, or at least, not
in any meaningful way. For Gonio, that which cannot be thought does not
actually exist in our understanding, as we cannot conceive of a greater. So if
we cannot even form this idea, then the argument does not even lift from the
ground. (2) Anselm understands Gonio’s other objection as: That even if that
which nothing greater can be thought, is thought, that if we can form an idea,
it simply doesn’t follow that nothing greater can be thought, exists in
reality. In other words, to the extent that we can form an idea of God, there
is nothing in that idea that God exists. So the stakes are big—if Anselm is
right, then God is proven, but if Gonio is right, then we cannot even attempt
to prove the existence of God.

Anselm replies by defending both claims,
that we can, indeed, have something greater than that which nothing greater can
be thought in our understanding and that, once we do, it follows that such a
being must exist in reality.

One point one, Anselm clarifies what he
means by thinking and understanding, something that he did not spend a great
deal quantifying in the Proslogian.
The sort of thinking at work in this text is what Anselm called ‘Mental
Conception’, or, where one has a conception of a human being in their mind, for
example, when a human being is before them in all their essence; we can have
the essence of things which are imaginary or do not exist. We are perceiving
these things before our mind’s gaze. What we cannot get before the mind’s eye
is the impossible. Anselm’s theory of thought allows for the possibility of
mental mis-firing; one can believe themselves to be thinking something and yet,
not actually be thinking it because one hasn’t gotten before their mind’s eye
the thing whose essence would inspire it. This is what Anselm believes has
happened with the Psalm’s fool: anyone who really has before their mind that
which nothing greater can be thought, sees that that being not only does, but
must, exist; for that reason, then, that thing which nothing greater can be
thought, cannot be thought, not to exist. Of course, getting that which nothing
greater can be thought before the mind’s eye, is tricky, and in doing so, by
mentally concentrating on its existence, rules out the possibility of its
inexistence (essentially). In denying, on behalf of the fool, that God can be
thought at all, Gonio is suggesting that the fool does not and cannot have any
such robust notion of God.

On point two: if nothing greater than can
be thought is thought, then it must exist in reality. Now that we have a being
before our minds, that which eluded the fool since he did not have it before
his mind’s eye, what is it like? We know that it has no beginning. And we know
that something which has no beginning is greater than something which has a
beginning. So that which nothing greater can be though lacks, in fact, a
beginning. We also know that this being can be thought while impossible things
cannot be thought; because if that which nothing greater than can be thought
did not exist, the only way it could exist, would have to involve beginning
itself to exist (something which lacks a definite existence, something which
merely existed instead of having to exist, would constitute having a
beginning.)

To sum up Anselm’s argument in his reply to
Gonio: that which nothing greater can be thought, can be thought, if, that
which nothing greater can be thought, can be thought, it exists in reality.
Therefore, that which nothing greater can be thought, exists in reality.

But how does any of this constitute a reply to Gonio’s island counter-argument? The truth is that both men were talking past one another. Gonio thought that Anselm replied on the principal that to exist in reality is greater than to exist in the understanding; after all, this is the premise which does the mischief in the lost island argument. But Anselm never realized that this was what Gonio objected to, because he never intended to claim that existing in reality is better than existing in understanding. All that Anselm meant to claim was that if you are thinking of that which nothing greater can be thought, as not existing, then you haven’t yet managed to think of that which nothing greater can be thought, because anything which is truly that which nothing greater can be thought is greater than something which is capable of not existing.